Robert Fripp strikes a weird note in Cambridge performance

Tuesday

May 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2013 at 8:57 AM

It happened almost at the end of Robert Fripp’s arguably weird concert experiment in a 243-year-old church in Cambridge. A 90-minute long performance by an eclectic ensemble of 70 very accomplished guitarists. The musicians—with guitars strapped around their shoulders—lined themselves in the front, back and aisles of the congregational section to form a tight circle around the audience seated in the pews. Instead of strumming on their instruments, which is the way we’re accustomed to hearing a guitar played, each musician picked on a single note—assigned to him or her.

Joseph Pereira

I heard the sounds of silence Friday night.

Not Paul Simon’s famed Sixties ditty but Robert Fripp’s arguably weird concert experiment in a 243-year-old church in Cambridge.

It happened almost at the end of a 90-minute long performance by an eclectic ensemble of 70 very accomplished guitarists. The musicians—with guitars strapped around their shoulders—lined themselves in the front, back and aisles of the congregational section to form a tight circle around the audience seated in the pews. Instead of strumming on their instruments, which is the way we’re accustomed to hearing a guitar played, each musician picked on a single note—assigned to him or her.

When plucked all at the same time, the notes sounded more like wind chimes than music. Then, the guitarists played their notes one at a time, creating a sound that traveled around the church in a counter-clockwise direction. While striking their notes, the musicians also jerked the head of their guitars towards the next performer, creating a sort of “Wave” effect, we see at Boston Red Sox games at Fenway Park. As the tinkling-bell-like sound traveled around the church, it grew quieter and quieter until it went totally silent.

But the guitarists continued to jerk their guitars towards one another passing along—as it were—their un-played note. The note was passed around several more times. I couldn’t hear the note (because it was silent) but I could see it in “The Wave,” going around the audience again and again. And again and again. Like an astronomer peering through a giant telescope at dark matter out in space, I realized then that, for the first time in my life, I was staring at the dark energy of sound. If there is negative matter, then what I saw was definitely negative sound. I not only saw it, I swear, I heard it.

I must apologize. The only descriptive word that comes to mind is—weird-- giving any one who attended the performance by Robert Fripp and The Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists VII at First Church at Cambridge’s Harvard Square the right to call it whatever they’d like. The guitarists—all of whom looked like they could, in a moment’s notice, segue into a rousing rendition of Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malaguena,” played single notes, or an occasional chord, throughout the evening, while standing or walking around in stiff-back postures. They formed circles and semicircles and lines and various other configurations as they played. At times they even mimed Tai-Chi-like movements with one hand as they marched in formation.

Fripp, the group leader, looked on--like a general over his troops--from a slight distance at various times during the performance. He barked out commands occasionally in words that only the troupe understood. And when he moved from command spot to command spot, his gait was more like a tiptoeing act than a walk, to keep his black leather shoes from making a sound on the hardwood floors of the church.

The graying bespectacled Brit is no stranger to the world of music. He is the Robert Fripp of the progressive rock bank King Crimson and venerable band member of a sundry of well knowns such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall, Talking Heads and Blondie.

After first looming into the public eye in the 1960s, his passion for the guitar morphed into a Zen-like discipline of tireless study and then into “Guitar Craft,” which is the name of a course he has taught on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in various academic capacities. Many members of The Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists are former and current “Guitar Craft” students. Part of Fripp’s allure is his uncanny ability to transform the hard-rock guitar into an instrument of the avant-garde.

Even the tuning of 70 guitars all at once in a room in midperformance sounds like a symphonic exercise. At the end, Fripp and his guitarists received a standing ovation, amplified with the stomping of feet on the church’s wooden floor. Not once but twice, the audience called for encores.

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